As it turns out, configd doesn't make any calls to Bash, so OS X and iOS are safe from DHCP exploits in this case. Also noteworthy, relatively ancient versions of OS X and BSD also don't default to the Bash shell.

Yeah, we had the dumb luck of rolling out a test of the new system image with the CC Packager distro on it to two workstations last night. When the designers arrived this morning they realized that none of their Adobe software would work.

I'm glad that I was able to convince the department manager that having ALL of the designer's workstations updated with the new software without some testing would be a bad idea, they'd all be dead in the water waiting on restores from backup to finish.

Actually, none of the CC apps work at all if the user hasn't had a chance to log in and activate them yet.

This is exactly what happened to us, fortunately we only rolled the image with the CC Packager distro out two user's workstations as a test. As a result, they are both pretty much doing no design work until this is resolved.

I'm sure we'll see a credit on our accounts due to an entire day of lost services that we paid for, right? Just like the cable and cell companies that hold monopolies in their respective markets do, right?

Simply being bipolar doesn't make someone a risk for killing their kid.

I used to think like that, but as I've grown older I've realized that some people are just totally unpredictable. It depends on the severity and other combined conditions, but there are batshit crazy examples popping up in the localand national news all the time. People say things like "oh I knew she was crazy, but I never thought she'd do something like that!", yeah we aren't all qualified psychological evaluators and apparently even those who are qualified make mistakes as well.

My kids' school does something similar. Every bleeping day they have 2-6 "important announcements" that they have to call my cell phone about. Every day I let them go to voice mail and delete it unheard, not because I don't care, but because I actually did listen to them in the beginning and they were never important announcements. It was often crap like grade so-and-so is having a fund raiser, or remember to send (thing) if your child is going on the field trip my kids weren't going on.

Oh man, some smart ass kid (I'm guessing) wrote their area code one digit off on the form that the stupid ass school presumably trusted the kid to fill out correctly. I started getting like 3-5 voicemails a day from some charter school in Texas with this annoying ass bubbly principal talking all GOOOO HIGHLANDERS about pep rallies, dress codes and attendance rates. Thankfully it was my GoogleVoice number so I promptly blocked it, and several other subsequent numbers, but I then started getting pre-recorded calls from all kinds of teachers telling me about how lil Jasmine ditched their class or whatnot. AND they are NEVER an actual human or auto-attendant system that you can actually use to get ahold of someone to get them to STOP calling. It went on for months before I had all of the various outgoing numbers blocked. Be thankful your child doesn't go to that school, it's F'n full on phone harassment.

Don't forget, Microsoft's own Windows NT4 with no USB "plug-n-pray" or mass storage device support without a special driver from the vendor was still being used and supported up until 2004; they were even offering extended support contracts to customers with large NT4 install bases throughout 2006.

Windows 95 OSR2 had USB device support, it also was pretty terrible by most standards for doing anything more than running a couple of applications at a time or playing a game. I guess you could say Win2K had USB support, but virtually nobody used it in the consumer space due to it's lack of game support. It wasn't until XP came out that MS had a decently stable OS with real protected memory, preemptive multitasking and also had decent 3rd party graphics support.

IANA EE, automotive or HVAC engineer either, however I do have a heat pump that heats and cools my home. Heat pumps work great for stationary applications, but you need a relatively large evaporator coil to generate any significant amount of heat. Compare a regular residential A/C unit to the equivalent tonnage heat pump and you'll see that the unit is almost twice the size. Automotive A/C condenser coils already take up all of the surface area they can get in the front of the vehicle's radiator. Also keep in mind that heat air-to-air pumps also require defrost cycles to clear the evaporator coil of frost accumulation, this requires an auxiliary heating method as well, unless you don't mind ice cold air being blasted at you during each defrost cycle. Place the evap coil on the front of a moving vehicle with precipitation constantly blasted at it and these defrost cycles will be even more frequent.

In theory, a heatpump would be great, but you need to solve a few problems with the conventional heat pump application first to make it practical. I really think it would just be easier to have propane catalyst heat that used those canisters that camping applications use. VW used to offer something similar for their air-cooled vehicles that burned gasoline called the ebersparcher

Just out of curiosity (and because I'm too lazy to google it, AND you're an EV builder), how exactly does the heat in an EV like a Tesla or Fisker work? I know it at least has to be supplemented by some type of resistive electric heating element, but is there also a method for circulating waste heat from the batteries and motor(s) to the cabin area to provide heat as well? Does this waste heat provide a usable amount of heat for say a Northern US winter climate?

I'm just wondering, because I know resistive electric heat has to suck a lot of amps. Depending on whether you just bundle up and tough it out with no resistive heat, vs cranking the heat like you would in an ICE-powered vehicle probably has a very considerable effect on range.

Have you actually used an iOS device for any extended period of time, or is this just conjecture based upon accounts of others and ramblings on forums?

I can't speak for the 3GS, but I had an iPhone 4 up until very recently and all of the OS updates, all the way up to 6.0.1 worked just fine for me. I mean, it was incrementally slower past iOS 4, as you would expect with more features (bloat) added for the newer more capable devices, but it wasn't as slow to be annoying or unusable like other devices I've had the displeasure of using. Battery life was always good for the two years I had the 4, I was regularly able to make it 24-48hrs on a charge all the way up to the last day I had it on 6.0.1.

Yeah, I'm not talking about Windows Updates though. We have free tools like WSUS, or SCCM (not free) available that give you fairly good control over the patch management processes. Security updates and patches are generally a good thing, we want those, they have benefit and value. Compared to WGA, which has absolutely NO "Genuine Advantage" to a company that creates system images with installation media from legitimate sources, and doesn't utilize PC's from sketchy OEM's with pre-loaded software. We know our software is "Genuine" and not tampered with because we paid dearly for it, had it shipped to us, or downloaded it directly from Microsoft's sources ourselves and checked the hashes. Anti-piracy measures like KMS only create additional administrative overhead in a business context, especially in a small to medium size business where we get little to no volume purchase discount anyways. Yeah KMS is free, but it's one more logically unnecessary system that we have to manage just to appease MS.

What RMingin was saying, is that this fix will affect the anti-piracy methods, which will affect everyone, but only temporarily annoy the pirates.

TL;DR: Dear MS, it shouldn't be easier to pirate your F'n software, than to purchase and use it legitimately, quit pissing off your paying customers.

Really? What are you basing this assertion on? 10.2 and 10.3 weren't very refined overall, but they were plenty quick with sufficient RAM and GPU, especially given the fact that the Quartz graphics system that they had developed way back in 2001 was (besides Amiga OS) the first mainstream OS to include graphics compositing capabilities to offload window manager rendering from the CPU to the GPU. Apple was way ahead on that, MS didn't even have Compositing working in Windows until Vista came out in '07.

10.6 was fast enough to run on the colored iMacs taht 10.1 could not, hence these users stayed on MacOS classic.

10.6 was the first OS X release that ditched Universal binary support and went Intel only, so no, it would not run on "colored iMacs" at all since they were PowerPC G3's. Hell, 10.5 wouldn't even install on the newer G4 iMacs without being forced to do so through OpenFirmware hacks or installer modifications. Running 10.5 was painful enough on those, it'd be relegated to novelty status on a G3.

Today WIndows 8 runs on 9 year old Pentium IV with ease.

Somebody correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't Win8 64-bit only? Is there even a such thing as a Pentium 4 capable of executing x64 code? My memory is a bit foggy on the P4's because AMD was trouncing Intel on price/performance back then, so I never had much experience with those space heaters. In any case, you'd have a hell of a hard time finding Win8 drivers for any system built around a P4, or an Athlon for that matter.

What you're saying about newer Mac OS X and other OS releases getting more efficient and faster is correct, but your historic examples are way off. Now get off my lawn!